Jeremy M Wolfe

Jeremy M Wolfe is Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, directing the Visual Attention Laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital. His research focuses on visual attention mechanisms and their application to real-world search tasks.

His work examines how humans deploy attention across complex scenes, whether examining art like Giotto frescoes or medical images like lung CT scans. Wolfe's research demonstrates that our visual search system is imperfect, sometimes causing us to miss critical targets that are directly in our field of view - a phenomenon with significant implications for medical diagnosis and security screening.

At his February 2019 lecture at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Wolfe illustrated how attention is guided by target features and scene structure, while highlighting socially important applications where these visual search failures occur in contexts like tumor detection and threat identification.